Curry

• 1. Introduction

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  Curry, the food historian Lizzie Collingham argues, is a category the British invented, not a dish India ever named for itself. "Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names," she writes, "but the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry." That single borrowed word now covers wildly different food. It names a spice paste in Thailand and a school lunch in Japan. It also names a loaf of hollowed-out bread in South Africa and a fixture on thousands of British restaurant menus. How did one outsider's label end up organizing so many unrelated kitchens? Why did some of the very cooks whose food it describes come to resent the word? And what, if anything, connects a Kashmiri lamb stew to a bowl of curry rice served aboard a Japanese naval ship? The answer starts long before the word "curry" existed, with spices ground by hand thousands of years earlier.

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• 2. What The Word Hides

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  The English word curry most likely comes from the Dravidian language family. It reached English by way of Dutch carrijl, Portuguese caris or caril, or some mix of the three. Its root may be the Tamil word kari, meaning a spiced mixture of fish, meat, or vegetable eaten with boiled rice. Similar words also turn up in Malayalam, where kari means hot condiments or meats and vegetables, and in Middle Kannada, Kodava, and Telugu.

  A 17th-century Portuguese cookbook already describes this word, drawing on trade with Tamil merchants along the Coromandel Coast of southeast India. It calls the dish a spice blend known as kari podi, or curry powder. The word's anglicized spelling, currey, first appeared in print in Hannah Glasse's 1747 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.

  The name has nothing to do with the curry tree, even though some curries include curry leaves among many other spices. The cookery writer Pat Chapman noted a resemblance between the words karahi and kadai, the wok-shaped Indian cooking dish. He offered no real evidence that the two words were connected. Curry is also unrelated to cury, the word used in The Forme of Cury, an English cookbook from the 1390s. That word comes from the Middle French cuire, meaning "to cook."

  None of these old recipes yet contained the tomatoes, potatoes, or chili peppers that would later define curry outside India. Those ingredients belonged to a different story, one that started with spice traders long before Hannah Glasse picked up her pen.

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• 3. Before The Chili

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  By 1500 BCE, Austronesian seafaring merchants were already trading spices between South Asia and East Asia. They sailed along the ports of southeastern India and Sri Lanka, building some of the world's earliest maritime trade networks.

  At Mohenjo-daro, archaeologists have found mortar and pestle tools used to grind spices as early as 2600 BCE. People there pounded cumin, fennel, garlic, ginger, mustard, black peppercorns, saffron, sesame seed, tamarind pods, and turmeric into seasonings. These went into meat, fish, grains, pulses, and fruit. Black pepper, native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, had flavored Indian cooking since at least 2000 BCE.

  Starch grain analysis on skeletons and pottery shards from Indian excavation sites has turned up traces of turmeric and ginger alongside garlic. Researchers call these early combinations "proto-curries." Before Columbus reached the Americas, Indian sauces could be sharpened only with black pepper or long pepper. Nothing in them was hot by modern standards, since chili had not yet arrived.

  Sambar, a dish of pigeon peas or lentils flavored with onion and mild spices, was typical of this earlier cooking. A key seasoning of the period was asafoetida, or hing, a foul-smelling gum harvested from plants of the genus Ferula. Despite its odor, it turns into a meaty, savory flavor once fried in oil.

  Chavundaraya II's 11th-century text Lokopakara calls for asafoetida, cumin, curry tree leaves, and mustard to season a dal. The 12th-century Manasollasa, written under the Western Chalukya Empire of South India, lists coriander, cumin, asafoetida, salt, and black pepper. A 15th-century cookbook from the Malwa Sultanate, the Ni'matnamah Nasir al-Din Shahi, flavors vegetables with asafoetida and sesame seeds fried in ghee. Lime juice and salt round out the dish.

  None of these dishes yet knew tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, squash, or chili peppers. Within a few decades, all four would arrive in India at once, carried by a very different kind of trader.

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• 4. The Columbian Turn

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  The Mughal Empire, founded in the early 16th century, brought new and subtly spiced dishes to India. These especially took hold in the north. The Indo-Persian cuisine of the emperor Akbar, recorded in the Ain-i-Akbari, could cook aubergines with asafoetida, cardamom, cloves, coriander, ginger, lime juice, onions, and pepper. That same court also produced biryani, blending Persian pilau rice and the Persian habit of marinating meat in yoghurt with India's own spice traditions.

  In 1510, the Portuguese established a trading post at Goa, on India's western coast. With it came chili peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes from the Americas. Food historian Lizzie Collingham suggests the Portuguese in Goa picked up Dravidian-derived words already used locally. They rendered these as caril or carree, spellings later carried into English by British travelers. That shift helped fix curry's modern meaning: a spiced dish served in a sauce or gravy.

  In 1598, an English translation of a Dutch travel book about the East Indies described a "somewhat sour" broth called Carriel, eaten with rice. A related Dutch word, karie, was in use in the Dutch East Indies from the 19th century onward. By that point, many Indians had migrated into Southeast Asia.

  Within a century of chili reaching Goa's kitchens, the dish would cross the Arabian Sea again, this time carried into British hands.

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• 5. How Curry Became British

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  English cuisine adopted curry from Anglo-Indian cooking in the 17th century. Spicy sauces began accompanying plain boiled and cooked meats. That Anglo-Indian style took shape under the British Raj. Memsahibs, the wives of British officials, instructed Indian cooks on the food they wanted, reshaping many dishes in the process.

  In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, few British women lived in India. British men often lived with Indian mistresses and absorbed local customs, language, and food. Curry itself was first served in British coffee houses starting in 1809.

  By the 19th century, Indian cooks were adjusting curries to suit their British employers' tastes. A quarama from Lucknow combined ghee, yoghurt, cream, crushed almonds, cloves, cardamom, and saffron. An 1869 Anglo-Indian version, called quorema or korma, dropped the cream, almonds, and saffron. It added instead the coriander, ginger, and black peppercorns that had become standard British curry spices. Collingham describes the result as "eclectic" and "pan-Indian," embodying a "passion for garnishes" and eaten only by the British themselves. She writes that curry went from "an unfamiliar set of Indian stews and ragouts" to something new. It became, in her words, "a dish in its own right, created for the British in India."

  Curry powder became a commercial product in the late 18th century. Indian merchants sold spice blends similar to garam masala to the British East India Company for shipment home. Brands including Crosse & Blackwell and Sharwood's date from that period and are still sold today. In the 19th century, Indian indentured workers carried curry with them to the Caribbean sugar industry. That spread the dish far beyond either India or Britain.

  By 2016, curry had become a fixture of British life on an industrial scale. An estimated 12,000 curry houses across the country employed 100,000 people. Combined, they generated annual sales of about £4.2 billion. In 2001, the British foreign secretary Robin Cook called chicken tikka masala "a true British national dish."

  Writing for The Times of India, journalist Zoe Perrett described the resulting cuisine as "Brindian." She called it a "Bangla spin on Indian regional dishes, twisted still further to tempt British tastebuds." Variants labeled "Kashmir" or "Malaya" add fruits such as banana, lychee, and pineapple. Perrett concludes the food might be "not Indian at all." British supermarkets now sell curry kits containing whole spices, a spice paste, and a sauce pouch. These let home cooks produce an "exceptional" curry quickly at home.

  British restaurants have standardized a scale of curry heat that starts with the korma, mild and creamy, traced back to the 16th-century Mughal court. A medium Madras, red and spiced with chili powder, dates to 1970s Anglo-Indian and British Bangladeshi kitchens. A hot vindaloo descends from the Portuguese dish carne de vinha d'alhos, pork in wine vinegar and garlic. It was sharpened in the 1970s with chili, vinegar, and potatoes. At the extreme end sits the phall, a 20th-century creation from British Bangladeshi cooks in Birmingham. It is built on high-strength chilies such as scotch bonnet and habanero. That same British appetite for heat did not stay on one island; curry was already remaking itself elsewhere, from Japan to Korea.

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• 6. Curry Remade In East Asia

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  British traders introduced curry powder to Japan during the Meiji era, in the mid-19th century. This was after the country had ended its long period of self-isolation known as sakoku. Japan officially classified the dish as Western food.

  The Japanese Army and Navy adopted curry rice as convenient field and canteen cooking. It spread even to conscripts from the most remote parts of the countryside. The Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force still traditionally serves curry every Friday for lunch. Many ships keep their own house recipes. A standard Japanese curry today contains onions, carrots, potatoes, and sometimes celery, simmered with meat in a large pot. It is occasionally sweetened with grated apple or honey.

  In 1905, domestically produced curry powder made the dish affordable for ordinary Japanese households for the first time. In the 1920s, the companies that became today's S&B Foods and House Foods began selling powdered curry. Cooks in Tokyo or Osaka invented curry udon and curry soba in either 1904 or 1909. They dissolved dried bonito flakes in boiling water, stirred in curry, and thickened the broth with potato starch.

  Curry bread, or kare pan, followed in 1927. The katsu curry appeared sometime in 1918, 1921, or 1948, depending on the account. The Oriental company developed a powdered instant curry roux in 1945. Bell Shokuhin introduced a block-shaped version in 1950, letting Japanese curry spread as an easy meal to cook at home. It entered Japanese school lunches for the first time in 1948.

  In 1963, House Foods launched Vermont Curry, an instant roux sweetened with apple and honey. It became a hit. The product softened curry's old reputation as a spicy, adult-only dish. It turned curry into a favorite among Japanese children.

  Curry powder also reached southern China, where grocery stores sell a version close to Madras curry powder. It comes with added star anise and cinnamon. In the former Portuguese colony of Macau, cooks developed their own dishes, including Galinha a portuguesa and curry crab. They also created a coconut-thickened Portuguese sauce. As early as 1886, the Chinese term Gali, for curry, had already appeared among the Chinese community in Singapore. It was likely carried onward into China by Malay Chinese traders.

  Curry reached Korea in 1969, when the company Ottogi began importing curry powder into the domestic food industry. Korean curry powder blends cardamom, chili, cinnamon, and turmeric. It flavors curry tteokbokki, made from rice cakes, fish cakes, eggs, and vegetables. As in India, it was European traders who first brought chili peppers to Korea. The chili-based sauce gochujang eventually replaced the soy sauce once used in tteokbokki. Far to the west, curry would take a shape found nowhere else, in a country reckoning with the legacy of apartheid.

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• 7. Bunny Chow

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  Curry reached South Africa through the migration of people from the Indian subcontinent during the colonial era. Distinct local traditions followed, including African curries, Cape Malay curries, and Natal curries. These included the traditional Natal curry and the Durban curry.

  Durban has the largest population of Indians living outside India anywhere in the world. South African curry kept diversifying through the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It produced ekasi, coloured, and Afrikaner varieties across the country.

  Bunny chow, sometimes called simply a "set," consists of lamb, chicken, or bean curry poured into a hollowed-out loaf of bread. It is eaten by tearing off pieces to dip into the filling. The name likely combines "bania," a Hindi word for merchant rooted in the Sanskrit vanij, with "chow," from "chow-chow," meaning a mixture.

  The bread-loaf method of serving exists because apartheid laws forbade black people from eating inside Indian restaurants. Since a hollowed loaf could be carried off quickly, it let people eat curry standing in the street instead. That same colonial-era migration also carried curry east into Southeast Asia. It carried the dish back toward India too, where many cooks would come to resist the word altogether.

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• 8. A Name India Resisted

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  Until the late 20th century, most Indians did not call their spicy dishes "curry" at all. The word belonged mainly to Anglo-Indian cooking. Dishes such as dopiaza and rogan josh kept their own specific names, which varied region by region.

  Food historian Colleen Sen notes that the Indian cook Madhur Jaffrey once called the umbrella term "curry" degrading to India's great cuisine. Jaffrey eventually accepted the category in her later writing. Indian curry sauces typically draw on black pepper, cardamom, chili peppers, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, cumin, fennel seed, mustard seed, and turmeric. As many as 15 spices can go into a single meat curry.

  Rogan josh, from Kashmiri cuisine, is a wet lamb dish colored red by Kashmiri chilies. It also gets its color from an extract of the red flowers of the cockscomb plant. It is eaten with rice or idli cakes in the south of India. In the north, it comes with breads such as chapatis, roti, and naan. Rice and curry together form the staple meal of Sri Lanka.

  In Burmese cuisine, curries are called hin. They are typically meat simmered in a paste of onion, garlic, shrimp paste, tomato, and turmeric, usually mild and somewhat oily rather than chili-hot. Thai curries, called gaeng, use a paste built from chilies, onion or shallot, garlic, and shrimp paste. Outside Thailand, they are often color-coded green, yellow, and red. Green is typically the mildest and red the hottest.

  Malaysian Indian cooks adapted curries such as gulai, made with coconut milk. The dish became a staple among the country's Malay and Chinese populations as well. Malaysian curries are commonly flavored with cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, coconut milk, shallots, chili peppers, and garlic.

  In Indonesia, curry is called kari, or kare in Javanese. In Bandung, cooks make lontong kari, combining lontong with a beef yellow curry soup. In East Java's Tuban Regency, a blue swimmer crab curry called kare rajungan has become a local delicacy.

  In Vietnam, curry known as ca ri arrived with French colonizers. They brought it from their Indian trading outpost at Pondicherry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cooks in the south adopted Madras curry powder and coconut milk for dishes such as chicken lemongrass curry, ca ri ga.

  In the Philippines, the oxtail stew kare-kare may trace back to Indian curry by way of Sepoy soldiers. They served during the British occupation of Manila between 1762 and 1764. Ginataan, the native coconut-milk dishes of the Philippines, only pick up the label "curry" once curry powder joins the pot, as in Filipino chicken curry. That single spoonful, more than any spice, is what still decides whether a dish anywhere in the world gets called a curry at all.

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